The Alchemist’s Cookbook – Combining AI, existential meaning and creativity

The Poetic Pirates Society: The Alchemist’s Cookbook – A work in Progress

With the surge of new technology, there is always the question: Where does this leave me, as an artist? Scary questions like: will AI take over my art? Will I lose my creativity to AI? Will AI render the things in art I value most obsolete? Will my needs to rearrange chaos into beauty, to surrender to a creative process, to reflect on the world around me, be useless in the near future?

With these questions in mind, I started working on a new project under my digital alter ego, The Poetic Pirates Society—an exploration of where art, technology, and philosophical/spiritual transformation intersect. For this project, I trained AI to paint in my personal style.

The Alchemist’s Cookbook: Turning Discomfort into Meaning

or,

How Today’s Loss is Tomorrow’s Gain

At its core, this project is a search for alchemy—not in the medieval sense, but in the act of transformation. Artists have always been alchemists, turning raw experiences into something meaningful. Pain into poetry. Chaos into composition. Discomfort into understanding.

For this project, I am training AI to paint like myself. Not to replace me, but to see if a machine can grasp the essence of imperfection, of the intuitive choices that make art feel alive. Can an algorithm learn to express struggle, nuance, and evolution? Can it reflect the human condition, or will it always be a mirror without a soul?

Artificial intelligence, NFTs, and blockchain technology have opened new frontiers in art, but they also raise important questions. Who owns creativity in a world where images can be generated instantly? What does it mean to create when machines can replicate our style? Does AI enhance artistic exploration, or does it dilute it?

I don’t have the answers. What I do have is curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and an urge to push against the boundaries of what creativity can be in a digital world. The Poetic Pirates Society is my ongoing experiment in this space—where I blend the old and the new, intuition and automation, human expression and machine logic.

This is not about nostalgia or blind optimism for the future. It’s about standing at the threshold and asking: How do we shape technology before it shapes us?

This is just the beginning. Let’s see where it leads.